The Linaro Developers Summit last week in Budapest was really impressive!

I attended the Linaro developers summit in Budapest last week with a number of my colleagues. With ten technical tracks in parallel you can imagine there was a huge amount of invaluable information being shared. I was amazed by the spirit of cooperation among the Linux community experts gathered in the room and participating remotely through chat. Some of the discussions were of such technical depth that I have to admit that they went over my head. So I listened attentively and refrained from asking questions that would reveal my lack of understanding!

Two key topics of interest are being driven by Linaro: Consolidation of the ARM kernel tree, to address the recent points made by Linus Torvalds, and memory management optimization. It was great to see the discussions between Linaro experts and experts from various companies, all in a true open source collaboration spirit.

One of the special events at the Linaro Developer Summit was the demo contest where contestants could win their very own Snowball. Two of the 3 top demos were awarded a Snowball. We were also participating in this demo contest, but we were very happy to have the Snowball given to Linaro Graphics & GeexBox demos. The GeexBox demo was shown by a former Alessandro Rubini’ student. Alessandro was of a great help for the Snowball wake up – it is a small world!

The two demos shown by ST-Ericsson were a good move toward a more homogenous public software offer. The first one was a GLK 2.6.38 with a Linaro Nano file system. A last minutes hack enabled perfect D1 video playback, fully decoded on the Cortex A9 (thanks to Tony Mansson and Mathieu Poirer).

The second demo was based on Android and managed by Adrian Bunk of Movial. As Movial is preparing the Android release for Igloo Community this demo was a very important milestone. It was showing a video playback with multimedia acceleration on HDMI. However, the demo most in demand was Angry Birds.

There were many other good demos shown, running on various developers boards. It is clear that developers are platform agnostic – as long as the board is fun, fully featured and accessible – Exactly how we like to think of the Snowball.

Greetings fellow MeeGon. Can you tell us when the Snowball will be available for public purchase and at what price? Are there drivers available for Mali 400 GPU that support hardfp instructions? Please correct the info at http://wiki.meego.com/In-vehicle#MeeGo_IVI_Development_Boards about the Snowball if it’s wrong. And thanks to the Linaro project for all their hard work making Linux work on ARM.

Andrea GalloSeptember 13th, 2011 09:44 AM

Hello Alison,

you can purchase Snowball from Calao Systems and download complete sw with hw acceleration from igloocommunity.org